Athene shook her head. “You’re changing.”
“Learning things. That was the whole idea.”
She started to read, and I left.
The next day was the games, where I was careful to do well in everything without actually winning anything. Simmea came third in the swimming. I could swim now, but I didn’t even enter the races. Human bodies aren’t made for that kind of exercise. The day after was the festival. We wore flowered headdresses and danced in the plaza before the temple of Zeus and Hera. Phidias’s huge chryselephantine seated Zeus stood on one side of the steps, and a large Hera from Argos stood on the other. I wondered, eyeing them, what Father knew about this enterprise, and what he would say. Athene was his favorite daughter, but even so. It would be possible to argue that we were bending his rules all over the place.
I avoided Simmea. I felt uncomfortable at the thought of her. I liked her very much. I admired her. I enjoyed her friendship. But Athene was right. In thousands of years I’d never mated with anyone who wasn’t perfect. I didn’t know if it was possible. If it turned out it wasn’t with some random girl, that didn’t matter all that much. With Simmea it could be a disaster.
It turned out I was worrying about entirely the wrong thing.
There’s a whole section in Book Five of the Republic about how the masters are supposed to cheat with the sex festival, to make sure the best get to have the best children. The children of the less good will be exposed anyway, but while everyone’s supposed to believe it’s entirely random, they naturally cheat for eugenics. I hadn’t forgotten this, but I had only thought it would mean that they’d be likely to match me with somebody beautiful after all. They did. But when I heard our names read out I froze.
“Pytheas, Klymene!” old Ficino read. My friends were pushing me forward and laughing. I walked mechanically towards the steps. I saw Klymene coming from the other side, not looking at me. The garland was tied around our wrists and our arms raised. Our eyes had still not met. We walked together down the steps and off through the dancers and down the street.
Eventually I looked at her. She was so pale and resolute that she’d have done for a portrait of Artemis. “I’m really sorry,” I said.
“It’s random chance,” she said. “It’s not your fault any more than it is mine. It’s just Fortuna laughing at both of us.”
“I mean I’m really sorry I said what I said to you on the mountain.”
She looked at me now for the first time. “That’s the latest apology I ever had.”
“Simmea said you didn’t want to talk to me. She beat me up. She made me realize what an idiot I was.”
“She made me practice being brave until I could be brave again,” Klymene said. “Simmea’s a good friend. And I didn’t want to talk to you right away. But it has been a long time. Years.”
“I didn’t know how long was long enough, and by then it had been a long time and it was awkward because of that.” I brushed my hair back off my face and realized that our hands were still bound together. I started to unwind the garland.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought—”
“You thought I was a coward and wouldn’t go through with it?” she suggested.
“I thought I was,” I said. “Do you want to?”
“It’s not a case of want, it’s a case of our duty to the city and the gods. We were married in front of Zeus and Hera. All over the city today, everyone is being married in front of the gods, so that there can be more children for the city.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“I don’t like you, Pytheas. I don’t trust you. It isn’t just what you said to me, it’s other things. You’re arrogant. You think so much of yourself. You don’t pay any attention to most people. I was only ever friends with you because I knew you were Simmea’s friend and she likes you. And when I had that cowardly moment you covered for me. That was good. But afterwards what you said just made me feel that you despised me—that you didn’t even see me. But this isn’t about you. This is about our sacred duty.”
“I said you were right.”
“Where are we going?”
I stopped walking. “They told me there were empty practice rooms with beds in them.” I waved vaguely. We had passed the turning to the street of Dionysos and had to go back. We walked now without talking. She was a pretty girl with nice breasts, soft and dovelike, as I had always thought. I wondered what our son would be like—a hero, certainly, but what kind? How strange it would be to watch him grow up day by day. The masters wouldn’t let us know which child was which, of course, but I would know. If I didn’t instinctively know I could ask Athene, but I thought even incarnate I’d be able to tell.
We came to the hall and went inside, hands still bound. Inside most of the doors were closed, but we found an open one far down the hall and closed the door. Only then did I unbind the garland. The wild rose branch twined in it had pricked my skin, leaving little beads of blood around my wrist. As I was licking them, Klymene dropped her kiton with as little fuss as if we were in the palaestra, and stood looking at me.
I had never before mated with a woman when we hadn’t been playing the game of running away and catching. I had always been the one catching. I had mated for the joy of ecstasy, in a sudden passion for some woman, or to conceive children. Usually when I fell in love it was with men, who in my own time had minds with more to offer me. I have fallen in love with women, but it’s rare. Sometimes women have refused me. (Cassandra and Sibyl were out for what they could get and deserved what they did get. In my opinion.)
This woman did not want me, but she was obedient to duty. I had to go to some considerable effort of imagination to want her, and to find duty in myself and the desire for a son. It helped that this was her first time, so I could instruct her into a position where I didn’t have to look at her face. Her face was like stone, and would have made it impossible. It was probably more comfortable for her too. She didn’t want foreplay—in fact she specifically refused it. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. I arranged her face down on the bed.
Father’s big on rape. He likes to turn himself into animals or even weirder things and swoop down on girls and carry them off. I’ve always liked the chase, whether it’s chasing a nymph through the woods or a seduction. Sometimes at the end of a seduction it’s been almost like that. I remember once in Alexandria, a woman called Lyra. Sunlight through a shuttered window falling across white sheets. She was a professional card player, and I’d beaten her in the game when she’d put herself in on cards she thought were unbeatable. She wore a veil and made up her eyes with kohl. There had been a moment when she let the veil fall that was almost like it was with Klymene. But once we were in bed she’d been greedy, more like a man, seeking her own pleasure, crying out. Klymene wasn’t like that at all.
Klymene wanted the result of this mating, but not the process. But enduring it was her choice. Having it happen at all was her choice. I would have undone the garland and gone off, and if we’d told nobody, nobody would ever have known, any more than Athene’s partner, dreaming of Catullus, would ever know. That would have been my choice, to regret this match and let her be. We were in this room and this bed and I was in her body because she had chosen it, because it was our duty. I thought of Lyra’s eyes above the veil. I tried not to think of Daphne. I thought of all the ones who had wanted me, who had met passion with passion and desire with desire, who fell in love with me and wrote poetry about it for the rest of their lives. Eventually, that was sufficient.